How long to upgrade preserving recordings?

[KateP]

Hi all,
In Hinsdale's guide, part 10, option #3, single drive to new larger drive while preserving recording it states that it generally takes 1-4 hours... In some circumstances can take as long as 8 hours or more.

What is peoples experience of how long? What affects the amount of time?

I started mine off (new = 120GB) at 1pm yesterday, got to approx 30% by 3pm, 52.47% by 5pm, no change at 10pm (but lots of CD reading), 54.23% by 6.30am (no CD reading).

Any suggestions, or reassurance that it is not going to take all week, (or more) appreciated!

[blindlemon]

The thing that has the most effect on the time is normally the size of the source drive - which you haven't told us! :)

However, it sounds as if maybe MFSTools is having trouble reading your drive. Did you check it with PowerMax or Hitachi's DFT first?

[Gavin]

When I swapped the drive last 120Gb to 160Gb (ok 137Gb) it took 26 hours. With hindsite I should have deleted the suggestions I didn't want but i copied everything..

[KateP]

The source drive is the original 40GB one. There didn't seem to be any problems with it.

I didn't check the new drive before I started.

Are you saying there may be a problem with the new or the old drive?

[aerialplug]

Upgrading from a 40GB drive to a 120GB took me 6 hours. By doing some simple maths, if you started out with a 120 (not that I'm saying you did!), it could take 18 hours or more to do.

Apparently there are some techniques you can use to speed this up but since I only had to do it once, it's never been a problem. At least you got some feedback - when I used dd to copy the drive contents, there was no feedback whatsoever - you just had to hope it worked. I allowed 8 hours because a coleague had upgraded his by leaving it run during a work day and it had finished when it got home so I assumed took lest than 8 hours.

If it's still going 24 hours after you started, considering you're upgrading from the 40GB drive, I think it's safe to assume something's gone wrong.

[blindlemon]

I didn't check the new drive before I started.

Are you saying there may be a problem with the new or the old drive?Could be either, but if you didn't check the new one then that would seem the likely candidate.

I'd abort the copy, check the drives, make sure that when reattached they are on separate IDE channels and run hdparm -d1 /dev/hdX against each drive port to ensure that the drives are being accessed in DMA mode before trying again.

[KateP]

Well, it had actually finished when I got home but I ran some checks anyway.

The new drive had DMA off.
As it is a Seagate drive I got and tried SeaTools on it. The full scan is finding bad sectors and it is not 1% through yet. Bother!

Thanks for your help.

[sanderton]

If DMA was off it will indeed take forever and a day.